Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: Delirium on September 25, 2009, 02:45:34 AM
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What is the best hard drive out there right now? I am looking at either Samsung, Seagate, or Western Digital.
I'm also looking at 32meg cache, 7200rpms, with the lowest clocked times available. (no Raptor or SSD units)
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Any western digital AALS drive will give you you needs
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Agree with TD, any good WD, not the cheapest ones they sell though.
Worth spending a few dollars more for a drive that lasts.
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Don't even think about Samsung... :O
Just wait, Ripley should chime in on this thread and give his opinion... :devil
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Don't even think about Samsung... :O
Just wait, Ripley should chime in on this thread and give his opinion... :devil
You got a problem with that? Besides I've always recommended WD drives.
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You got a problem with that? Besides I've always recommended WD drives.
No Ripley...just waiting to see what you recommend as far as the OPs needs go.
I have no recommendations other than forget Samsung.
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i have never had any problems with W.D.s
whats the big hype about SSD? ? ?
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i have never had any problems with W.D.s
whats the big hype about SSD? ? ?
SSD's provide superior access times and transfer rates compared to traditional hdds. They have an achilles heel with write performance but that's already at least partly already solved.
They cost too much still which is why they're not yet so common.
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Depending on the SSD implementation, the overall performance degrades as it is used, eventually reaching floppy performance.
Seems a lot of folks have an opinion on which HD is best. The quality of any HD, on any given day, will be a direct result of the parts that went into it. As parts are not exact, from unit to unit, the drive you pickup today may be the best one ever, or worst one ever.
I have seen virtually every drive manufacturer have a failure within minutes of starting.
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i buy from newegg myself, just bought a 650 WD black, 60 whatever it was dollars, 5 year guarantee,
my other backup drive getting to small anymore.
This is my first WD drive thought I would try them, I have always used Seagate, after they bought maxtor, I have had good luck with their products so far.
cattb
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i agree with skuzzy, i have seen every brand of HD fail havent really seen one better then the other. i would say the best way to set up HD drives is with some type of RAID that either mirrors your data or stripes it to prevent any data loss should a drive go bad.
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Ditto what Skuzzy said.
Over the decades I've had drives fail from every major vendor within a day of installation. I've also had drives from every major vendor live on for more than 8 years of daily use in horrible conditions.
From this, I've learned not to worry too much about specific drives from specific vendors.
These days, I generally look at the length of warranty, just to hedge my bets in favor of a free replacement down the road. Seagate has 5 year warranties, and that's fine, but some models of WD do too. I've picked both for my main gaming desktop.
-Llama
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I generally buy off of performance reviews, price, and warranty. I will never leave my data solely stored on one source of media.
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Western Digital Caviar "Black" seems to have great performance, great warranty, and the price is usually just a tiny bit more than other drives with much shorter warranties. I'm personally waiting for the caviar black 2TB drives to get to a reasonable price, and then I'll buy a stack of them like I did with 500GB drives when they hit the bottom of the $/GB curve.
As for SSDs, Intel's latest SSD supports the "trim" command (must also be supported by the OS) which prevents the slowdown Skuzzy mentions. Anandtech did an article recently on the new SSD drives and the new trim command, which can be thought of as defrag for SSDs. In a nutshell, the claims are legit and the new drives won't suffer from the same problems as the older ones. For now though, I think only vista and win7 have the required OS support and the drives that have the feature are still very expensive.
I figure SSDs will hit true consumer pricing after win7 has been out for a year and hardware supported only by win7 becomes mainstream. Win7 is good enough that I think most of the computer geeks holding onto winXP will switch over reasonably soon, at least on their main computers. WinXP will probably survive as virtual machine images, dual boot options, and on secondary computers since you can't do a direct upgrade from XP to win7, but I think even the geeks will switch to win7 because it not only works, it will offer some compelling features and new hardware support that will be hard to ignore.
That doesn't mean the switch won't be one more support nightmare for people like skuzzy to deal with, but it is a good enough OS release to push hardware development in the same ways that every previous major version except for vista did. Vista couldn't even push DX10, but win7 will get people buying hardware to make the most of the new OS.
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Depending on the SSD implementation, the overall performance degrades as it is used, eventually reaching floppy performance.
Seems a lot of folks have an opinion on which HD is best. The quality of any HD, on any given day, will be a direct result of the parts that went into it. As parts are not exact, from unit to unit, the drive you pickup today may be the best one ever, or worst one ever.
I have seen virtually every drive manufacturer have a failure within minutes of starting.
Skuzzy I don't know how well you've been following SSD's but the latest indilinx and intel controlled SSD's have an automatic trim system which will purge stale blocks. This returns the write performance back to normal levels. The controller starts trimming the stale blocks immediately when the drive is idle.
Most SSD's still lack trim capability so they will essentially become bricks after a while. Chalenge has first hand experience, he jumped the wagon a bit too early.
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No sense bickering anymore, just get the AALS series and get the 5 year warranty.
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For now though, I think only vista and win7 have the required OS support and the drives that have the feature are still very expensive.
Linux is supposed to have trim support too.
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Skuzzy I don't know how well you've been following SSD's but the latest indilinx and intel controlled SSD's have an automatic trim system which will purge stale blocks. This returns the write performance back to normal levels. The controller starts trimming the stale blocks immediately when the drive is idle.
Most SSD's still lack trim capability so they will essentially become bricks after a while. Chalenge has first hand experience, he jumped the wagon a bit too early.
I keep an eye on it. That is why I said, "depending on the implementation". There is still a fair number of SSD's that use the older tech, available in the market.
Then there is still lack of thorough field testing for longevity/reliability available on the new tech. I think there is still room for caution in the SSD market.
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SSDs are on the reasons I made this thread.
http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,274478.0.html
If was install AH on a SSD all by itself and sent all my films and screenshots to the regular HD or external HD I could extend the life of the SSD.
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Anyone out there have experience with the 15,000 RPM Fujitsu SAS drives? I've been drooling over the Fujitsu specs, but the only SAS drives that I have used are the H-P drives (OEM'd by Seagate, I think) that can be ordered with the H-P DL300 series and DL500 series servers. Compared to SATA drives, I like the reduced latency as well as the dual-port data path that SAS provides.
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Anyone out there have experience with the 15,000 RPM Fujitsu SAS drives? I've been drooling over the Fujitsu specs, but the only SAS drives that I have used are the H-P drives (OEM'd by Seagate, I think) that can be ordered with the H-P DL300 series and DL500 series servers. Compared to SATA drives, I like the reduced latency as well as the dual-port data path that SAS provides.
Hopefully they're not as "reliable" as the HP 450GB 15k SAS drives...got nearly 100 of those in the SAN arrays at work, replaced more than 20 in less than a year so far. The 350GB 10k drives are doing much better.
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Hopefully they're not as "reliable" as the HP 450GB 15k SAS drives...got nearly 100 of those in the SAN arrays at work, replaced more than 20 in less than a year so far. The 350GB 10k drives are doing much better.
:O Over 20% failure rate in less than ONE year?!?! We had lots of those little 2.5" sigle-port SAS drives (both 10K and 15K) in our DL 320/360/380/580 boxes, and I never saw even *one* of those die over the course of a year.
Thanks for the info, Gyrene. :salute
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new egg has a WD black drive for sale anyone interested
http://promotions.newegg.com/NEemail/Sep-0-2009/FS29/index-landing.html?nm_mc=EMC-
i put it up since there was some interest
cattb/Tim O
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newegg's current hard drive specials are a great example of pricing and bang/buck...
You can get a 750GB western digital caviar black for under $79 now, which is a GREAT deal.
However...
You can also get a 1.5TB drive for $109, which is twice the storage for a lot less than twice the price.
What do you really need? For a primary drive if you don't have tons of data (videos, pics, etc), the WD drive is probably a better primary drive. It is fast and has a great warranty. But if you're a data packrat, that 1.5TB drive is amazingly good on storage/$ ratio.
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newegg's current hard drive specials are a great example of pricing and bang/buck...
You can get a 750GB western digital caviar black for under $79 now, which is a GREAT deal.
However...
You can also get a 1.5TB drive for $109, which is twice the storage for a lot less than twice the price.
What do you really need? For a primary drive if you don't have tons of data (videos, pics, etc), the WD drive is probably a better primary drive. It is fast and has a great warranty. But if you're a data packrat, that 1.5TB drive is amazingly good on storage/$ ratio.
Not to forget the 1.5Tb drive will be a lot faster due to higher areal density platters.
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Not to forget the 1.5Tb drive will be a lot faster due to higher areal density platters.
Again with the "generalizations" Ripley? That would be like making the same generalizations about SSD drives. I remind you...not necessarily true.
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Higher areal densities logically translates to higher data transfer rates if the rotational rate is constant.
What happens to the performance after the data is read off the platter is another matter.
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I have yet to read a review where a larger hd with higher density and same rotation speed wouldn't score higher in benchmarks. I have repeated the results using my own hd's. So there shouldn't be much controversy about it.
What I fail to understand is why people find this so hard to grasp. Benchmark your own 1Tb 7200rpm drive against a 250Gb 7200rpm and you'll see.
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Do not misunderstand me Ripley. There is no reason why a higher areal density would not translate into higher raw data throughputs. It would take a poor design to not accomplish that.
With higher areal densities, you have less seeks to do for the same amount of given data which is another area where performance is also enhanced.
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Do not misunderstand me Ripley. There is no reason why a higher areal density would not translate into higher raw data throughputs. It would take a poor design to not accomplish that.
With higher areal densities, you have less seeks to do for the same amount of given data which is another area where performance is also enhanced.
NP, I didn't point the post at you ;) I meant the posters who have challenged my stance in general.